The iron bars were still right where they’d left them. Spiral had assured Kana that the game wouldn’t let anyone else steal them, but he was less confident that the quest items wouldn’t despawn if they got too far away from them. “I was pretty sure though, since you don’t actually pick them up here. Look,” he said, pointing to the piles of ore.

Each one had a glowing symbol over top of it, like a stylized hand that had been painted onto the air. Spiral approached one of the piles and placed his own hand over top of it. A window popped up in front of him with a few options across the bottom.

Curious, Kana approached one of the other piles and repeated the action. He read the window out loud. “This iron must weigh a hundred kilograms! It’s way too heavy to haul back to its owner by hand. He did say he has a cart though.”

Below that were options to continue, pause, or abandon the quest. The first and last ones were obvious enough, but the middle one wasn’t so clear. “What happens if I pause the quest?” Kana asked.

“Nothing, really. It’s more for when you’re working multiple quests at a time and don’t want to trigger events on the one you’re not actively following. Like if we had a quest to go foraging for food here and didn’t want the orcen bandits to keep spawning as we picked apples or whatever, we could pause this quest to do the other one.”

Since this was the only quest he currently had, Kana just selected the continue option. The dialogue window closed and the scattered piles of iron faded away to be replaced by one neat stack. “Come on,” Spiral told him. “Sooner we get the cart back here, sooner we can catch up to the part Valit’s on.”

Spiral led the way, clinking softly with each step. He ignored the other two and pored over his radial menu as they walked, which left Kana to entertain Valit’s endless commentary. Kana found Spiral’s sudden motivation to study suspicious. It wasn’t like he’d ever been that interested in studying to pass any of his tests at school.

“The way you guys are talking, I’m guessing you’re a new player?” Valit asked.

“Hmm?” Kana blinked and looked over at her. The question had come out of nowhere on the heels of speculation about whether the wildflowers in the nearby fields were accurately colored. “Oh, yes. First day. Spiral’s taking some time away from his main to teach me the ropes.”

“I’m new too,” she said. “I started about three weeks back. I think I mentioned that I was a ranger originally. I wasn’t really very good at it though. So I spent most of my time in the city talking to people and buying and selling stuff.”

“No? I don’t know much about the other classes yet.”

“Oh it was super fun at first! But then I got to level 10 and I got this eyesight enhancing ability that magnifies your view distance and gives you accuracy bonuses. I did not like it. Everything got kind of grainy and washed out looking, and it made my head hurt.”

“You’re not supposed to leave Telescopic Vision on all the time,” Spiral said, not looking up from his radial menu. “It’s for scouting and sniping. It has upgrades at higher levels that reduce the blur too.”

“Oh really?” Valit asked. “Maybe I gave up too soon. That’s ok though. Like I said, I really wanted to try out crafting anyway and I’m having fun with this class. I’m going to make so much drol once I can modify and repair equipment.”

Valit kept chattering with only the minor “Yep” or “Mmhmm” from Kana. After a few minutes, they reached the NPC smith’s cottage. It looked more or less the same, except now there was a cart parked out front. It was a rickety thing that didn’t look like it could even hold the iron, let alone haul it back.

“Back already?” the NPC asked in the same gruff voice. “Did you find my missing iron?”

Kana glanced at the other two. “Do you want to…?” he trailed off

“Nah,” Spiral said with a grin. “You go ahead.”

“Yes,” Kana said to the NPC, making a conscious effort to speak clearly. “We came back to borrow your cart so that we can bring it back to you.”

The smith nodded and gestured toward it. “Let’s get to it then. Ain’t got no horse to haul it, so I’ll be doing that part.”

He walked over and grabbed a metal bar that had been worked into the cart where a harness would normally go. “Lead the way,” he said.

A window popped up notifying Kana that his quest progress had been updated and informing him that his new objective was to lead Bertrin back to the iron. “Who is Ber- oh, wait, the NPC?” Kana said.

“Yeah. If you focus on him like you were going to interact with him, you can get some basic stats.”

Kana followed Spiral’s directions and approached the smith. Once he was within range, he could see some information floating around the NPC, including that his name was in fact Bertrin and that he was a level five blacksmith. Another line indicated that he was a quest giver that Kana was actively working with, and a final line told him that the name of the quest he was on was “The Price of Iron.”

Bertrin started plodding forward and the old rickety cart creaked and groaned. It rattled with each step Bertrin took, doing nothing to dispel the impression that it could fall apart if it encountered so much as a stiff breeze. Spiral and Valit both started walking near it, and Kana followed them. “When we get close to the end, more bandits will show up to reclaim the iron,” Spiral said. “The objective is to protect the NPC and the iron ingots. There will be a mini-boss fight too.”

Valit shuddered. “That thing was nasty. I died to it twice before I figured out I could let the NPC tank it for a bit as long as I didn’t get too trigger happy. And THEN I failed the quest again after that when I didn’t pull the boss off the NPC quick enough and he died.”

“I wonder if there will be any new surprised this time,” Spiral said. “I did all these quests by myself before.”

Rather than cut through the fields and take a straight line to the pile of iron they’d left behind, the cart was forced to follow the curving path of the road as it wound around trees and hills. Between that and the NPC’s slow pace, the trip took considerably longer. Valit never stopped talking, but since half of what she was saying wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, Kana just kind of tuned her out.

Bertrin came to a stop and let go out of the push bar he’d rigged up to his cart. He made a show of stretching his arms and shoulders before saying, “That all of it? There should have been more.”

“Uh… yes?” Kana said, shooting a questioning glance at Spiral.

“I suppose it’s better than I would have had if you hadn’t shown up to help. Let’s get it loaded up and I’ll get you some drol for your trouble.”

Most of the heavy lifting fell to Spiral, as he was playing the only strength-based class. Kana could carry three bars at a time, but it drained his stamina too quickly to do it for more than a few trips. Valit didn’t even try to carry more than one. The NPC of course carried twice as much as anyone else, and after a few trips, Kana asked, “Why are we helping at all? Why not just let the NPC load it up?”

Spiral shot Bertrin a dark look. “If you stop working for too long, he stops to and gives you a lecture. Plus he charges more to teach you at the end of the quest line on account of how you were being lazy.”

“Does he really? I didn’t know that,” Valit said. She eyed the pile and tried scooping up two ingots at once. Watching her stagger toward the cart while over encumbered was too funny not to laugh at. She gave Spiral and Kana the finger and flopped the bars down with a grunt.

“You know there’s a minimum strength requirement to even take up the profession, don’t you?” Spiral said. “Sorcerer was probably about the worst possible choice you could have made if you wanted to take up smithing as a profession.”

Valit stared at him for a second. “Damn it,” she muttered.

Before she could say anything else, the NPC shouted out, “Look out! There’s more of ‘em in the trees!”

Arrows filled the air before four more bandits spawned and charged out at them. Unlike the first group, these ones were better armed. Spiral met them half way and body slammed one to the ground before pivoting to deflect a slash from another one with his shield. Kana was right behind him with a straight thrust, which he turned into a sweeping slash that not only parried a blow from an orcen raider’s sword, but allowed him to chain an arc lance into the group. It lit up two of the monsters and dropped a third of their health bars.

He was pushed back a step as they both attacked at once, but Valit took some of the heat off with a few well-placed frost beams. They didn’t do a lot of damage, but it looked like they had some sort of slowing effect that made it much easier for Kana to block their attacks and find his own openings. He chained a clipping sweep special attack into his melee swings to help tie up the swarm of pig-faced monsters, then turned to finish off one that Spiral had stunned.

“WHOAH?!” Bertrin yelled as the ground started rumbling and a small explosion of loose earth filled the air. A monster crawled out of the dirt, looking like nothing so much as a giant mutated ant with way too many spikes on its legs and mandibles. Its body was a glossy dark blue, clearly armored.

The remaining bandits squealed in fear and attempted to break off from combat. “Screw that,” Valit called out as she did her best to lock them down with frost beams. “More XP if we kill them all.”

Spiral rushed forward to handle the nightmare ant while Kana harassed the slowed orcen bandits. They made quick work of two of them, but the final remaining monster reached the trees and, once it was behind cover and able to shake off the slowing effect of Valit’s magic, it quickly escaped. Kana returned to the fight to find Spiral on one side of the ant and the NPC on the other.

Its HP bar said it was a midnight swarm guard, and not only was the bar itself as long as the war golem’s had been, it was twice as thick. Spiral had made almost no progress in whittling it down, but by the same token, he was skillfully blocking the swarm guard’s attacks and his own HP was almost completely full.

The NPC smith struck at it with his hammer, which seemed to be doing almost no damage as far as Kana could tell. Valit’s magical attacks were shaving slivers off its health, but the slowing effect was more pronounced. Against the raiders, it had only slowed them down for a second or two as she rotated between targets, but with only a single enemy, it was permanently slowed.

That did not mean they were safe. The thing had six legs, after all. Spiral kept the majority of its attention focused on him, but occasionally its back legs would lash out. Sometimes Kana managed to avoid the kicks, but not always. Clipping sweep didn’t seem to do much, since knocking out one leg out of six didn’t really affect its balance, and while arc lance did do more damage than his regular attacks, it was only usable once every fifteen seconds.

With three players and an NPC working on it though, the swarm guard went down after a minute or so of hammering on it. Spiral still had most of his health, and Valit never took a single hit. Kana was ironically in the worst shape of the three of them from the sporadic kicks the monster had tossed out that he hadn’t been quick enough to dodge.

When it died, a notification popped up informing him that he’d gained 50 XP and reached level 3. Below it, a second window showed him the loot he’d acquired from killing the midnight swarm guard, which was an item called an enormous mandible. It had a small quest item icon next to it, and touching that opened yet another window.

“Take the mandible to the local town of Celidar as proof that the midnight swarm has started appearing in the area so that they can prepare,” Kana read.

“We’ll do it later once we’re done playing with the piggies of the sea,” Spiral told him. “For now, let’s finish getting the iron loaded up and get paid.”

Bertrin gave the monstrous ant’s corpse a disgusted look before trudging back over to the remaining iron. “Every year that swarm spreads farther. Seems like it’s growing faster too. Ten years ago, you’d have to walk for a month to even find someone who’d heard of the midnight swarm. Now they’re right here on my doorstep.”

“What are you talking about?” Kana asked.

The NPC looked at Kana in surprise. “What, you don’t know what you just killed? It’s a bug. And where there’s one, there’s a hundred more. Way I hear it, these things have colonized underneath whole countries and pop up looking for food to take back to the rest. They’ve been a problem in Elegard for decades now.”

“It’s the lead in to the first major storyline quest,” Spiral explained. “The midnight swarm is a bunch of monster ants that tunneled through the ground and pop up all over the place to hassle people. There’s almost always a quest to deal with a satellite colony in every town. And the NPCs almost always say something like, ‘Thanks for helping to push the swarm’s expansion back, for now’ because the whole theme is that the swarm can never be stopped, only slowed down.”

“I heard somewhere that the devs are planning a timed event quest where the swarm finally reaches a capital city and it turns into a war zone,” Valit added. “I’m hoping I’ll be a high enough level to participate when it goes live.”

The three of them continued chatting as they finished loading up the iron. By the time they were done, the swarm guard’s body had despawned and the chunks of torn up earth disappeared, leaving the field flat and clean like it had been when they’d first found it.

The trip back took even longer. “I swear the devs did it just to piss people off,” Spiral said. “No reason this guy couldn’t have a horse or a donkey or whatever.”

“The only time I ever see NPCs with horses is when they’re farmers,” Valit pointed out. “And besides, enjoy the scenery. This place is beautiful.”

Kana looked around. It just looked like some empty fields and occasional trees. Admittedly, that wasn’t a normal sight living deep in the city in the real world, but still, it wasn’t like the view was anything special. Valit seemed to think so though, and he didn’t see any reason to argue about it.

When they got back to the smithy, Bertrin walked over to them and pulled out a leather pouch. “Here,” he said, pouring out some money. “You earned it.”

After accepting the money, a small loot window opened telling Kana he’d received 100 drol and 100 XP for finishing the quest. His XP bar shot to almost completely full just from the bonus XP, but missed it by 4 points. “That’s annoying,” he said. “Almost but not quite a full level.”

“4 points, right?” Spiral asked. “We’ll get it soon enough.”

“What now?” Kana said.

“Now you guys are caught up to me and we can finally work on the same quest,” Valit told him.